[Wgcp-whc] Shapiro's Book available

Richard Deming richard.deming at yale.edu
Tue Nov 16 00:36:21 EST 2010








Dear All,

on weds I'll send the minutes of our very generative and provocative  
discussion with C.D. Wright. In the meantime I wanted to send word  
that copies of David Shapiro's  New and Selected Poems is available at  
the Whitney Humanities Center.  Our next session will be Dec 3 and the  
poet will join us for a discussion of his work on Dec 10.

Shapiro is one of the most prolific and important figures of the  
second generation of the New York School (having published more than  
20 books of poetry and criticism).  He was accepted into Columbia at  
age 16 and worked closely with Kenneth Koch.  he published his first  
book of poems at age 18 and went on to write the first monograph on  
John Ashbery. he was a finalist for the National Book Award at 24.  He  
is also a talented art writer and an accomplished violinist (an actual  
child prodigy).  He covers the waterfront, as they say.  Below, I'll  
append two short pieces about Shapiro--one is a blog post from Ron  
Silliman and the other is a piece by Thomas Fink.  And here is a link  
to an MP3 of Shapiro reading in 2008 http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Shapiro/Shapiro-David_Segue-Series_BPC_3-22-08.mp3



So, feel free to grab a copy of Shapiro's book, but since supplies are  
limited only do so if you think it is likely that you'll be able to  
make at least one if not both sessions devoted to Shapiro. But don't  
wait, copies go quickly!

More soon,

Richard Deming, Co-coordinator


=======

from Silliman's blog
Monday, March 19, 2007


Nothing is harder or more tricky than a selected poems. As Robert  
Grenier demonstrated when he delivered a selected Creeley that showed  
the poet’s work centering around the poems that confront language most  
directly – focusing on Words and Pieces more than on the earlier  
“popular” For Love – not everybody views the same poet the same way.  
Several Quietist poets have suggested that Mauberly represents the  
pinnacle of Pound’s achievement, but then I would edit a selected  
Eliot completely absent of the molasses that is the Quartets. It would  
be fun, just as an exercise, to see just how many different John  
Ashberys we could create via a selected poems. And we know how some  
poets, including both Auden & Moore, actively revised their own pasts  
through cautious, if injudicious, editing.

So it pleases me no end to see that the David Shapiro who emerges from  
New and Selected Poems (1965-2006) captures what is unique about this  
most difficult (& just possibly most rewarding) of all New York School  
poets. One way of looking at Shapiro might be to import Zukofsky’s  
musical notion of the integral & to suggest that for Shapiro, the  
upper limit is Joe Ceravolo, the lower one Kenneth Koch. That’s a  
range with a discernible path, but an enormous reach from one to the  
other: Here is a poem that has elements of both:

A Problem

There are two ways of living on the earth
Satisfied or dissatisfied. If satisfied,
Then leaving it for the stars will only make matters mathematically  
worse
If dissatisfied, then one will be dissatisfied with the stars.

One arrives in England, and the train station is a dirty toad.
Father takes a plane on credit card with medical telephone.
One calls up America at three-thirty, one’s fiancée is morally alone.
But the patient is forever strapped to the seat in mild turbulence.

Thinking of America along psychoanalytic lines, and then
delicately engraving nipples
On each of two round skulls
You have learned nothing from music but Debussy’s ions
And the cover of the book is a forest with two lovers with empty  
cerebella.

Beyond the couple is a second girl, her head smeared out.
This represents early love, which is now “total space.”
These are the ways of living on the earth,
Satisfied or unsatisfied. Snow keeps falling into the brook of wild  
rice.

It took me quite a few years to learn how to read a poem like this, in  
good part because, while I “got” Joe Ceravolo instinctively as a young  
poet, it took me a long time to warm toward the work of Kenneth Koch  
whose surrealism originally struck me as far too derivative of what  
I’d read elsewhere translated from the French. Here, I once would have  
found myself loving certain lines & images (“the train station is a  
dirty toad” and that great final sentence, which has both image &  
tonal echoes of Grenier’s early work – I’m not sure that Shapiro even  
knew of Grenier at the time this must have been written in the very  
early 1970s), wishing they hadn’t been “stuck” in the midst everything  
else. Now, however, I can see all the ways in which “everything else”  
really is necessary, just how very closely calculated every decision  
is, like when to use punctuation & when not. There’s a whole narrative  
here just in how periods are used & where: it’s no accident that they  
turn up midline just twice, both times following the very same phrase,  
each at the end of similar, tho not entirely parallel, sentences.  
Aesthetically, read aloud, the two sentences could not have a more  
profoundly different sense of sensuality – and the second makes the  
final sentence so much more powerful.

The poem is also both sad & serious in ways quite unlike Koch, unlike  
Ceravolo also for that matter, an emotional register that one finds in  
Shapiro that is rare anywhere else in the New York School – there are  
instances of wistful regret in Ashbery perhaps, but that’s  about it.  
As if one of the registers of how difficult it is to live day-to-day  
in New York City  is that, even as a poet, you never can let your  
guard down. In this way, Shapiro is completely different from  
Berrigan, O’Hara, Padgett & many later poets, precisely because he  
lets us see the jagged vulnerability that is such an important part of  
his psyche:

The snow is alive

But my son cries

The snow is not alive
The snow cannot speak!
The snow cannot come inside!
You cannot break the snow!

But the snow is alive

And the tree is angry

This is the first section, of two, of a poem that takes its title from  
that first line, a part of the title series from After a Lost  
Original, written some 20 years after “A Problem.” Formally, you can  
see how close this poem gets to Ceravolo’s sense of a magical world,  
but nowhere in Ceravolo will you ever find this tone, which is both  
layered & complicated, with more than a little hurt.

If Shapiro is emotionally the bravest poet among the New Yorkers, it’s  
not accidental that he’s also the most political – indeed, one might  
say he’s almost the only political presence, at least for his  
generation. Once you get to Joel Lewis, Eileen Myles & after, this  
isn’t so rare, but before Shapiro – who was very visibly a presence  
during the Columbia student strike circa 1968 – it appears not to have  
been even an imagined possibility. Try to imagine Frank O’Hara or John  
Ashbery at an anti-war rally a la Ginsberg, Bly, Levertov or  
Rothenberg. Or Ted Berrigan organizing a rally to support his best  
friend Anselm Hollo back when the immigration service was trying to  
deport this partaker of cannabis. Political action is not only a fact  
of Shapiro’s biography, it’s in the work, in poems as diverse as  
“House (Blown Apart)” from the 1980s or the very recent “A Burning  
Interior,” one of whose sections is this “Song for Hannah Arendt”:

Out of being torn apart
comes art.

Out of being split in two
comes me and you. HA HA!

Out of being torn in three
comes a logical poetry. (She laughed but not at poetry.)

Out of the essential mistranslation
emerges an illegitimate nation.

Better she said the enraged
than the impotent slave sunk in the Bay.

Out of being split into thirteen parts
comes the eccentric knowledge of “hearts.”

(Out of being torn at all
comes the poor-rich rhyme of not knowing, after all.)

And out of this war, of having fought
comes thinking, comes thought.

The very flatness of these lines almost echoes Levertov’s most  
political pieces, even if Shapiro’s source undoubtedly is (again)  
Koch, (again) put to purposes Koch himself could never have imagined.  
But it’s simplicity is undercut with the two post-rhyme interjections  
– and consider how that laughter sounds at the end of the fourth line:  
it is very much laughter without joy, an extraordinarily complicated  
emotion to present in a poem, even in this one, which in so many ways  
is heart-breaking.

When Joe Ceravolo’s selected poems, The Green Lake is Awake, appeared,  
it had a huge impact on people’s sense of the New York School, gen. 3  
and beyond, because Ceravolo had been something of a secret save to  
the people for whom he was really really important (a situation not  
unlike Jack Spicer’s during the decade between his death and the  
appearance of the Collected Books). Shapiro’s selected won’t have the  
same impact – tho it should – in part because he’s never truly  
disappeared, steadily bringing forth books now for more than 40 years,  
doing important work as an art critic, visibly a presence around New  
York. Yet I’ve never been certain just how many poets actually know  
David Shapiro & his work. Because Shapiro wrote superbly when he was  
very young – January was not only a book of poems published Holt,  
Rinehart & Winston in 1965, a time when even Frank O’Hara couldn’t  
find a real publisher among the trades (Grove Press was a bottom  
feeder there), but was written for the most part by Shapiro when he  
was still in high school – it would have been easy (but wrong) to  
impose on him the narrative of the brilliant savant, and not to  
recognize the decades of discipline he’s subsequently added to what he  
brought to the blank page in the 1960s. He’s not Frank Stanford goes  
to New York. Nor is he a jack of all arts, master of none, tho his  
skills as violinist (the career ultimately not taken) and art critic  
are daunting. And because he’s one of the more anxious souls around  
the poetry scene, I’m not sure just how many people really know him as  
the generous, loyal, brilliant friend to so many poets he’s been all  
these years. The person he reminds me of most in that regard is Bob  
Creeley.

So this volume is one of the great “must have” books of the year. If  
you have any interest in the New York School, or in the New American  
Poetries, or even just broadly in the history of the post-avant, David  
Shapiro’s New and Selected Poems is required reading. It’s also a  
great, if complicated, joy.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


  Thomas Fink

David Shapiro’s ‘Possibilist’ Poetry

http://jacketmagazine.com/23/shap-fink.html

During his nearly forty year poetic career, David Shapiro, born in  
1947, has often been linked with John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Ron  
Padgett, Joe Ceravolo, Frank Lima, and others associated with the New  
York School, itself a heterogeneous grouping of poets. It is a matter  
of historical record that ‘senior members’ of the New York School  
enabled Shapiro to get his early start and that he has, in turn,  
supported writers of the ‘school’ in his own editing and criticism.  
However, I believe that it is a disservice to the complexity of his  
poetry to confine him to this affiliative frame.

Another diverse (and, these days, tremendously influential) ‘school,’  
Language Poetry, has absorbed the influence of New York School  
innovations, along with those of Stein, the Objectivists, Black  
Mountain, and various others in ways that bear substantial comparison  
with Shapiro’s exploratory poetry and poetics. Among the Language  
Poets, perhaps only Michael Palmer has cited Shapiro as a fellow  
traveler, but in the crucial period of the seventies, it is clear that  
their cultural spheres were significantly overlapping: members of the  
Language School and Shapiro were grappling with the ‘defamiliarizing’  
poetics of Russian Formalism, the language theory of late  
Wittgenstein, and Poststructuralist critical theory.

In an article that acknowledges a certain degree of common ground  
between Shapiro and the Language Poets, Carl Whithaus asserts:  
‘Shapiro’s poetry,’ unlike Language Writing, ‘is not about revelation  
or the production of meaning; rather it is about loss and memory,  
those fleeting traces of the past inscribed imperfectly in words.’ I  
must insist that issues involving ‘the production of meaning’ cannot  
take a back seat to any other component of Shapiro’s work, even as  
‘loss and memory’ are also major concerns.

Opening the title-section of the title-sequence of his most recent  
book, A Burning Interior (2002), Shapiro, as in various earlier poems,  
articulates compelling figures of ‘tracing’ as indicative of the  
problematic of representation, whether of the past or of immediate  
intensities: ‘Burning Interior// of  a copy of nothing/ or more  
precisely a series/ of xerox sketches of/ burning interior- 
exteriors...’ (1). In diverse fashions, Shapiro’s work and Language  
Poetry both feature vigorous investigation of how arbitrary or logical  
placement of ‘interiors’/ ‘exteriors,’ distinctions between supposed  
‘origins’ and ‘copies,’ and designations of ‘nothing’ and ‘substance’  
arise and may be contested in the uses of language.

At the outset, it is important to note that poets like Palmer, Ron  
Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Carla Harryman, Barrett Watten, Charles  
Bernstein, and Bruce Andrews have strongly contextualized their poetic  
theory and praxis as Marxist. David Shapiro, whose politics come  
through in the poetry as distinctly left liberal, has never done so.  
An oft-cited passage in Ron Silliman’s essay, ‘Disappearance of the  
Word, Appearance of the World’ (first published in 1977) suggests why  
he and other Language Poets consider the destabilization of  
referentiality a crucial Marxist gesture. Silliman reads the ‘passing’  
of ‘language... into a capitalist stage of development’ as ‘an  
anaesthetic transformation of the perceived tangibility of the word,  
with corresponding increases in its expository, descriptive, and  
narrative capacities, preconditions for the invention of “realism”,  
the illusion of reality in capitalist thought’ (The New Sentence 10).  
For him, ‘capitalism’ ‘narrows’ ‘the function of reference in  
language... into referentiality.’

Whether or not he would agree with Silliman’s specific historical  
analysis of cause and effect, Shapiro in his John Ashbery An  
Introduction to the Poetry (1979), demonstrates massive suspicion of  
‘realist’ narration and the presumption of referential solidity, and  
he also frequently insists upon the importance of ‘the tangibility of  
the word’: ‘One of the central functions of an “abstract” poetry’ like  
Ashbery’s ‘is to be aware of itself as non-discursive palpability.  
Such poetry is involved in particularity without a stable  
ground’ (175). These remarks are uncannily pertinent to prose-poems of  
the late seventies like Ron Silliman’s Tjanting and Lyn Hejinian’s My  
Life, whose sentences feature a tremendous amount of precise,  
‘worldly’ description without pointing to a narrative or discursive  
center. (Of course, many Language poets have acknowledged the  
influence of Ashbery’s most syntactical disjunctive, experimental  
poetry on their own work.)

When Rae Armantrout validates ‘language-oriented writing’ as ‘work’  
that ‘sees itself and sees the world,’ thus behaving in an ‘ambi- 
centric’ way, she praises writers like Susan Howe, Carla Harryman, and  
Hejinian who ‘bring the underlying structures of language/ thought  
into consciousness’ (546). Many—perhaps most—of Shapiro’s poems  
illustrate these kinds of focus. In ‘November Twenty Seventh,’ a poem  
published in 1983, the reiterated term ‘nothing’ marks the negative  
scrutiny of referentiality’s assertions of stable ground:

I’ve built nothing; you are the architect.
You are near me like the sound of an archaic car.
I know that I love the verb not to know.
Do you love it? The distance is like a Chinese garden.
I pluck pomegranates out of the Halloween stores.
Then I keep looking at this phrase like summer hills.
The mountain represents nothing, the mountain air
Represents nothing, but two birds seem bad enough.
In these things there is an immense exile like a surface:
And when we try to stop expressing it, words are successful. (To an  
Idea 76)
In an essay entitled ‘Migratory Meaning,’which stresses that readers  
are trained and thus seek to bring all the parts of a literary text  
into relation, and to do so as ‘parsimoniously’ (115) as possible, Ron  
Silliman lists aesthetic devices in a poem by Joseph Ceravolo that  
strenuously resist this effort and, thus, in Armantrout’s terms, cause  
readers to be conscious of ‘underlying’ linguistic ‘structures’: ‘key  
terms which resist specificity’; ‘evidence that the title does not  
“name” the poem as a whole, but functions instead as a caption’; ‘a  
seeming rejection of anaphoric connection between sentences’ (The New  
Sentence 119).

Certainly, Shapiro’s title, ‘November Twenty Seventh,’ provides no  
awareness of the poem’s totality. The only seasonal reference is to  
Halloween, and, if this is supposed to be a diary entry, it grants no  
access to the ‘inner life’ of a diarist. As a ‘caption,’ the poem  
could refer to the day it was written, and the date may have some  
private resonance to the poet, or it could ‘represent nothing.’ As in  
much of John Ashbery’s work, identification of speaker and addressee  
and their placement in a dramatic context in Shapiro’s poem above are  
unavailable. The indeterminacy of the pronouns ‘infects’ and is  
further ‘infected’ by other undefined ‘key terms.’ What is it that  
‘the architect’ has ‘built,’ literally or metaphorically, and why is  
the speaker unable to ‘build’ anything? Is the ‘mountain’ an  
architectural or linguistic structure or natural ‘thing’? And how and  
why is it, along with the surrounding ‘air’ (atmosphere or song?) and  
‘birds’ (real birds or odd people?), not a source of representation?  
How can ‘exile’ inhere in the solid presence of ‘a mountain,’ unless  
that mountain is but a word?

On the one hand, at least in the first six of the poem’s ten lines,  
‘rejection of anaphoric connection between sentences’ is apparent in  
the strange shifts from image to image. For example, how does the  
‘Chinese garden’ relate to the ‘Halloween stores,’ as if any store is  
confined to the sale of items for one holiday (other than Christmas)?  
And yet, there is a tenuous ‘narrative’ push/ pull involving a ‘you’  
and an ‘I,’ and one may impose a scenic quasi-continuity in the  
movement from ‘hills,’ to ‘mountain air,’ to ‘birds,’ and finally to  
the ‘we’ (you and I?) asked to refrain from ‘expression’ to allow  
language to ‘succeed’ when its users do not presume to make it  
represent more than it can.

The concluding sentence does seem to indicate that the poem can be  
read as a performance of Armantrout’s ‘ambi-centric’ gesture: poetry  
attending to its own materials and representative possibilities and,  
in some mediated way, to the ‘world’ of unstable selves, ‘mountains,’  
and ‘birds.’ Perhaps the ‘I’ is the poet who does not ‘construct’  
language (the ‘you’), since the ‘architecture’ of linguistic  
possibilities precedes him/ her. In writing a poem, the poet expresses  
‘love’ for (and perhaps frustration about) his own inability to know  
and experiences the intense pleasure and/ or pain and, finally,  
acceptance of an ‘exile’ of phenomenological imagery from symbolism  
and meditative coherence, the severance of ‘surface’ (or what Shapiro  
in the Ashbery book calls ‘palpability’) from ‘depth.’ Given all of  
the disjunction and sounding of ‘nothing’ in ‘November Twenty  
Seventh,’ such a reading can be no more than plausible, if  
unverifiable speculation.

In concert with the skepticism about narration and transparent  
‘referentiality,’ both Shapiro and many of the Language poets are  
deeply committed to an expansion of poetic possibilities and a  
resistance to limitation of stylistic avenues. In ‘An Interview with  
Hannah Mockel-Rieke,’ Charles Bernstein observes ‘that the  
interconnection among the poetic styles attended to in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E  
has to do with the rejection of certain traditionally accepted  
techniques for poem-making and an openness to alternative techniques —  
together with a distrust of the experimental as an end to itself,’ as  
well as the refusal to valorize ‘any new style or technique or device’  
as ‘the gold pot at the end of the rainbow’; for Bernstein, ‘a  
commitment to the need for a multiplicity of stylistic approaches  
among a multiplicity of poets, and even for one poet’ (My Way 64) is  
central.

Admittedly, Shapiro’s forays into prose-poetry have been less  
sustained than those of many Language poets. However, sequences in his  
last three books juxtapose different strophic and stanzaic patterns,  
prose and verse, relatively coherent narrative elements, dream  
elements, and fragments of meditation. The elegiac opening of the  
sixteenth section of the sequence, ‘Voice’ (1994) entitled ‘A Note and  
a Poem by Joe Ceravolo in a Dream,’ provides a cogent lyric  
explanation, not only of Ceravolo’s approach, but of the drive of  
Shapiro’s own poetics to expand possibilities:

He was a poet of grammar
and a love poet and what
is more he showed the re-
lationship between grammar
and love. When he perturbed
syntax he seemed to in-
vert? reinvent? universe?
the possibilities of love
by making so many multiple
relations possible and/or
present or present tense.
He is a possibilist poet
entrances with its naïve
or Utopian anti-grammar. (After a Lost Original 70)
Rather than being ‘anti-grammar,’ Shapiro often pushes for ‘Utopian  
alternative grammar’ that abandons unitary utterance for multiplicity.  
The fragmentation within (or following) the second sentence in the  
passage above is a good example. Two infinitives are followed by a  
noun (‘universe’) that can either be interpreted as the object of the  
infinitives, banging against the most obvious object following the  
last question mark, or as a new verb coinage.

Shapiro’s question hinges on the subtle shift of the second to last  
letter in two verbs (‘r’ to ‘n’). According to the first reading, the  
poet asks whether Ceravolo desires through syntactical innovation to  
shuffle the ‘universe’s’ existing elements or to make new ones, and  
‘the possibilities of love’ stand in an apposite, hence equivalent,  
relation to ‘universe.’ According to the second reading, Shapiro seeks  
to know whether his late friend and colleague attempts to ‘invert’ and/ 
or ‘reinvent’ and/or bring a ‘universe’ into being out of the  
materials of love’s ‘possibilities.’ (The verb ‘universe’ is not  
merely a synonym for ‘universalize about’; it is something more  
actively generative.) There is no compulsion to choose between the two  
alternatives, but their co-presence tells us that multiplicity exists  
in the uncertainty of grammatical and syntactic relations, as well as  
Shapiro’s heterogeneous imagery and frequently surreal tropes. Of  
course, those who have scorned Language Poetry tend to confuse  
multiplicity of these kinds—the insistent cultivation of possibility  
that can be characterized as ‘possibilism’—with total randomness and  
utter unreadability.

The second example of ‘perturbed syntax’ in Shapiro’s passage involves  
the lack of punctuation separating the weird enjambment of ‘poet’ and  
‘entrances,’ the unsure identification of ‘entrances’ as plural noun  
or third-person singular verb, and the jarring use of the pronomial  
adjective ‘its.’ An ordinary sentence might read: ‘He is a possibilist  
poet whose/ work entrances with its naïve/ or Utopian anti-grammar’ or  
‘...poet who/ entrances with his naïve/....’ or ‘He is a possibilist  
poet./ He provides entrances with its [the poetry’s] naïve/....’ None  
of my versions have the compression, lyric charge, or range of what  
Shapiro wrote, and that distinction indicates that commentary can only  
chase after the poetry without catching it.

Could the Marxist contexts of Language Poetry significantly negate my  
attempt to sketch common ground between the ‘possibilist’ practices of  
Language writers and those of David Shapiro? Leaving this question to  
other readers and other critical occasions, I maintain that it is  
important for Shapiro’s work to be part of the general conversation  
about contemporary poetry that, in Silliman’s terms, advocates for  
‘the tangibility of the word’ over ‘the illusion(s) of reality.’


Works Cited

Armantrout, Rae. ‘Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?’ In  
the American Tree. Ed. Ron Silliman. Orono, Maine: National Poetry  
Foundation, 1986. 544-546.

Bernstein, Charles. My Way: Speeches and Poems. Chicago: University of  
Chicago Press, 1999.

Shapiro, David. A Burning Interior. Woodstock, New York: Overlook  
Press, 2002.

———. After a Lost Original. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1994.

———. John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry. New York, New York:  
Columbia University Press, 1979.

———. To an Idea. Woodstock, New York: Overlook Press, 1983.

Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York, New York: Roof Books, 1995.

Whithaus, Carl. ‘Immediate Memories: (Nostalgic) Time and (Immediate)  
Loss in the Poetry of David Shapiro.’ Rocky Mountain Modern Language  
Association. (1997)
http://rmmla.wsu.edu/ereview/53.1/articles/whithaus.asp
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